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chapter 12 The Papacy, Power, and Print: The Publication of Papal Decrees in the First Fifty Years of Printing Margaret Meserve Historians of early modern Europe have long remarked on the closely inter- twined histories of printing and the Reformation.1 Recent studies have cast new light on just how the new technology of print was adopted by the Reformers and contributed to the rapid spread of Luther’s challenge to papal authority.2 The picture that emerges is that of an enterprising group of theologians and scholars working in collaboration with equally enterprising printers to spread a revolutionary message to the European reading public. Using cheap formats like the broadside or the quarto pamphlet, publishing texts in both the high scholastic Latin of academic theology and in local vernaculars, and relying on images as well as text to convey their key points, Reformers and printers worked together to launch a momentous religious and social movement. Meanwhile, conventional wisdom has it, the papacy, the conservative and authoritarian institution on the receiving end of these printed critiques, stood by, unsure how to respond or unwilling to seize the same tools and engage in the same popularising discourse. This somewhat simplistic account (which I admit I have further simplified here) overlooks the fact that at the start of the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church presided over the largest and most elaborate communication apparatus in the western world.3 The pope claimed spiritual jurisdiction over every Latin-rite Christian from Iceland to the Middle East and beyond; for 1 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, David Gerard (trans.), The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (London: N.L.B., 1976), pp. 287–319; Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and cultural transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Stephan Füssel, Douglas Martin (trans.), Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 159–194. 2 Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and his Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation (London: Penguin Press, 2015). 3 For a comparison with medieval China, see Patricia Ebrey and Margaret Meserve, ‘Giving the Public Due Notice in Song China and Renaissance Rome’, in Hilde De Weerdt and © Margaret Meserve, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004448896_014 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Margaret Meserve - 9789004448896 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 08:07:59PM via free access 260 Meserve centuries, the papal chancery had been issuing documents (bulls, briefs, par- dons, dispensations, confessional certificates, indulgences, and the like) to these far-flung communities.4 Arguably it was the ubiquity of papal docu- ments (and the economy of grace and pardon that brought them into being and which they in turn allowed to flourish) that prompted Luther to formulate his new theology in the first place. The Church’s communication system had expanded to exploit the new technology of printing from almost the very moment of its invention. The sub- stantial but little-studied archive of early papal print, which is the subject of this article, is surprising for both its variety and its scale, and reveals that the late medieval Church, despite its conservative and authoritarian tendencies, was entirely ready to adopt the new technology of mass communication.5 Nevertheless, the uneven way in which the new medium was used in its early years reveals something of the priorities and prejudices of the popes and their chancery officials in Rome, on the one hand, and those of papal commission- ers or local clergy at work on the ground across the continent, on the other. The Roman centre was slower to adopt print than was the European periph- ery. However, after a few decades of relatively sparse production, papal use of the press rose dramatically during the energetic and aggressive reign of Pope Julius II (1503–1513) and continued under his successor, Leo X (1513–1521), author of the first bulls to condemn Luther’s theses and eventually, the pope who excommunicated him. During their two pontificates, dozens of papal bulls, briefs, monitoria, and other decrees were put into print by presses in Rome as well as abroad, in Latin but also in German, French, and Italian, often deploying a striking and innovative graphic as well as textual vocabulary. Thus there was plenty of papal print before the Reformation, and plenty of it after 1517, as well. How much of it was effective is another question. The story of the Renaissance papacy’s energetic use of the press has intriguing implications Franz-Julius Morche (eds.), Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800–1600 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), pp. 345–386. 4 For the workings of the medieval chancery see Thomas Frenz, I documenti pontifici nel medioevo e nell’eta moderna (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di paleografia, diplomatica e archivista, 1989); for its geographical reach: Gerhard Jaritz, Torstein Jørgensen, and Kirsi Salonen (eds.), The Long Arm of Papal Authority: Late Medieval Christian Peripheries and their Communication with the Holy See (Bergen/Budapest/Krems: Central European University Press, 2004); Kirsi Salonen and Ludwig Schmugge, A Sip from the “Well of Grace”: Medieval Texts from the Apostolic Penitentiary (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009). 5 The topics sketched in this article are treated in more detail in Margaret Meserve, Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). Margaret Meserve - 9789004448896 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 08:07:59PM via free access THE PAPACY, POWER, AND PRINT: PAPAL DECREES 261 for the larger history of communications technology. It may be that it was not their command of print that gave the Reformers their early advantage over Rome so much as a genuinely more persuasive rhetoric: that it was the mes- sage, not the medium, after all. Papal Printing in the Fifteenth Century The papacy was involved with the art of printing – albeit in an oblique way – from its earliest days. As Gutenberg brought the great work of his Bible to com- pletion in the mid-1450s in Mainz, his shop had already started producing smaller works, possibly as a way of experimenting with and refining Gutenberg’s new technique. These ephemeral pieces included two indulgences issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1454 for members of the faithful who contributed funds to a new crusade against the Turks, who had conquered Constantinople the pre- vious year.6 These were followed, in 1456, by a bull of Calixtus III encouraging further contributions to the crusade, a text which appeared in print in both Latin and in a German translation.7 In 1459, the archbishopric of Mainz fell vacant, and two candidates vied for the position: one backed by Pope Pius II and one supported by the cathedral chapter and city. Each side used the press to publish letters supporting their claims and attacking the other candidate, including some seven bulls and briefs issued in the name of Pius II and printed by Gutenberg’s partners in Mainz, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer.8 That 6 For the attribution of these unsigned early pieces to Gutenberg, who may have been oper- ating two separate shops in Mainz, one with Johann Fust and one on his own: see Janet Ing Freeman and Paul Needham, Johann Gutenberg and his Bible: An Historical Study (New York: The Typophiles, 1988), pp. 62–65 and Füssel, Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing, pp. 25–29. 7 In this article I use ISTC numbers for incunabula and USTC numbers for items printed after 1500. The 30-line indulgence using the type of the 42-line Bible: ic00422400; the 31-line indul- gence using the type of the 36-line Bible: ic00422600; Calixtus’ Bulla Thurcorum: ic00060000 (Latin) and ic00060100 (German). See George Painter, ‘Gutenberg and the B36 Group: A Reconsideration’, in Dennis Rhodes (eds.), Essays in Honor of Victor Scholderer (Mainz: Karl Pressler Verlag, 1970), pp. 292–322; Janet Ing, ‘The Mainz Indulgences of 1454/5: A Review of Recent Scholarship’, British Library Journal, 9 (1983), pp. 14–31; Blaise Agüera y Arcas, ‘Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg’s DK type’, in Kristian Jensen (ed.), Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling, and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (London: British Library, 2003), pp. 1–12; Joseph A. Dane, Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 32–56. 8 Kai-Michael Sprenger, ‘Die Mainzer Stiftsfehde 1459–1463’, in Michael Matheus (ed.), Lebenswelten Gutenbergs (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), pp. 107–141; Christian von Heusinger, ‘Die Einblattdrucke Adolfs von Nassau zur Mainzer Stiftsfehde’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch, (1962), pp. 341–352; Konrad Repgen, ‘Antimanifest und Kriegsmanifest. Die Benutzung der neuen Margaret Meserve - 9789004448896 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 08:07:59PM via free access 262 Meserve dispute eventually led to violent conflict in the city of Mainz, which prompted many of the city’s early printers to flee in search of other markets. Their num- ber included many of the German printers who went on to set up shop in the city of Rome in the 1460s and 1470s.9 Papal bulls were thus some of the earliest texts to be printed, and their pub- lication was closely bound up with contemporary political crises, both local and international; but no one could claim that Nicholas V or Calixtus III or Pius II commissioned or even knew that these documents were being printed in their name in the distant Rhineland.
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